There’s a lot of people desperate for their brand or idea to make cash online, and some mistakenly think that a million hits to their website within a week will instantly make that happen, and taking advantage of free global socia media channels in the certainty that increased traffic = financial success.

Wrong.

I came across this article dated 7th August 2012 which asks the question:

What happens if you violate Twitter’s terms of service and buy followers?

The answer: Not much, according to a guy who tried it a couple of weeks ago.

We heard from David B. this morning about how he bought himself about 70,000 followers, overnight, for $25 from some he found on Fiverr.com, a site that lets you advertise what you are willing to do for $5.

David B. is a longtime Twitter user. He’s had an account since 2006, way back when the service was still called Twttr. Over the years, he built up about 400 followersâ€”real people he actually knows.

Earlier this year, he was working for a startup willing to try lots of crazy stunts to get the word out on its new product. So one night, after a few drinks, David B. decided to buy followers for his company’s account. It seemed like a good idea at the time. He was sober enough to try it first with his own account and not the company account, since buying followers can get an account banned.

He contacted five vendors on Fiverr, each offering to add between 4,000 to 21,000 followers to his account. Total cost: $25.

The next morning, he had about 75,000 followersâ€”all fake bot accounts. And then … nothing. “I don’t get any additional retweets off them,” he told Business Insider.

If Twitter noticed that a guy with 400 followers for years suddenly had 70,000 more overnight, they kept their mouths shut. His account wasn’t flagged or banned. David B. told us that most of the fake accounts look real enough, with pictures and normal-sounding Tweets. They are hard to tell from the real deal.

As we previously reported, there are ways to use these bots to get more Twitter juice. You can also pay the botmasters to retweet a tweet to try and make it land on a trending list.

But a better idea is save your money.

Fewer followers made up of real people is better than 70,000 robot friends, and David B. will be the first to tell you that.

Â This really jogged my memory .. I can bring to mind more than a few big players in e-commerce who have had this idea and have asked me to setup accounts and buy traffic. My answer is always the same – find another SEM who will, because I’m not wasting my time and your money.

Deep in the quagmire that’s called ‘Irrelevant Traffic’ lives a cespool for buying Twitter followers or Facebook fans and similar opportunities of buying traffic from dubious sources with the thought of overnight success.

Non-targeted and traffic from uninterested people won’t bring in sales – aim for specific targeted traffic, even if it’s 10 hits a day.

I’d rather that than 1,000 visitors come to my homepage and click away immediately, ramping up my bounce rate and lowering my reputation. When my 10 targeted visitors come to my site, they stay a while, and I can use the data Google Analytics gives me to see how to improve my site, even for only 10 visitors.

Google Analytics gives me data on how long people spent on my pages, how many pages per visit, the most popular pages (Top Content) and the top exit pages, plus much more.

If I see a page with a high bounce rate and low time spent on there, I look to see how I could improve, maybe a better call to action, a tweak of text, looking at my competitors and updating regular content that would keep people interested to read.

Good luck and stay focussed with relevance – Google rewards and loves relevance and so do your visitors.

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